


Je voudrais bien de toi

by destinyofshipwreck



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Masturbation, Oral Sex, Orgasm Denial Lite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-02
Updated: 2018-04-11
Packaged: 2019-04-17 14:18:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14190822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/destinyofshipwreck/pseuds/destinyofshipwreck
Summary: “If you came here to seduce me, Tess, it’s not going to work. We had an understanding.”She reaches between them and fumbles with the button of his jeans.“Yeah, we agreed that we’re not gonna kiss, or fuck, or do anything.” She reaches down the front of his boxer briefs and wraps her hand firmly around his cock. “I’m not kissing you, I’m not going to fuck you, I’m not doing anything.”





	1. hands off

**Author's Note:**

> Shoutout to @tessabirtue's proposed new vm tag #edging on ice.
> 
> Don’t fact-check me, I know that “prurient” was probably never a Globe weekend crossword clue at any time from 2016 to date.

It doesn’t count when Tessa waylays Scott in his kitchen, because nothing really happens.

He’s digging around in the fridge for components to assemble into dinner with Tessa before they attempt the _Globe_ crossword, a standing Saturday invitation. He’s just unearthed a package of smoked salmon on a thin cedar plank emblazoned with a Coast Salish motif, which he had obviously bought to give someone as a souvenir and forgot about. Oh well, it’s his now. Poached eggs on smoked salmon with braised chard and black beans it is.

They don’t fuck anymore, on purpose, by agreement, after discussion and consideration, and his distractions have become increasingly elaborate by necessity. One must stay occupied, is what Tessa had intoned to him, giggling, when he asked how she expected him to cope. He might take up woodworking next.

He doesn’t hear her come in, but she’s there by the counter with a four-pack of Lune de Miel when he turns around with his hands full of salmon and greens.

“Hey,” he says. “You’re early. You won’t have to poach eggs for another twenty minutes.”

“Thanks, it’s nice to know I’m needed. I brought beer,” she adds, unnecessarily. Her eyes are bright and she looks a little flushed and the word _prurient,_ from last Saturday’s crossword, springs into his mind.

“Bring it here,” he says, and after she’s set it in the fridge, he wraps his arms around her.

She sighs and melts into his embrace. “Can we just stay here for a while,” she asks.

“Of course. What’s up?”

She shifts uncomfortably and there’s an awkward pause before she says, “I, uh, thought it would be easier to, uh, cope, with all this, once we decided we were doing it. Or, uh, not doing it.”

Scott loves her with a particular keenness when she tries to talk about an emotion she’s feeling in the present tense, because it’s always Tessa at her clumsiest. He decides to bail her out her this time and supplies, “Me too. I miss it, and it’s hard not to think about it.”

He can see her trying to keep a casual expression on her face, but then she swallows hard and he almost laughs out loud. “I just, I thought we should clear the air, is why I wanted to talk about it.”

She’s clumsy _and_ a terrible liar, but he’ll let her have this one. “Oh yeah. Life is pain, Tess. I’m thinking of trying carpentry just so I can have something to keep my hands busy.”

She laughs into his chest and says, “Do what you have to do. I’ve been spending a lot of time on Pinterest.” Her proximity, the sharp base note of vetiver in her fragrance, and the affected lightness of their conversation are all starting to have an effect on Scott, and Tessa can feel it, pressing her hips closer to his. 

“If you came here to seduce me, Tess, it’s not going to work. We had an understanding.”

She reaches between them and fumbles with the button of his jeans. “Yeah, we agreed that we’re not gonna kiss, or fuck, or do anything.” She reaches down the front of his boxer briefs and wraps her hand firmly around his cock. “I’m not kissing you, I’m not going to fuck you, I’m not doing anything.”

It’s not quite a total lie. Her head is resting against his chest and she’s breathing deeply and deliberately, but she doesn’t move, and neither does he, his arms still around her waist, even though he’s throbbing and he’s desperate to turn her around and bend her over the counter like he has before, or wrap his hands around her ass so she can wrap his legs around him, or for her to sink onto her knees in front of him, anything, instead of not anything, and he knows she would let him, but Scott follows her lead. He slows his breathing to match hers. He can feel himself dripping obscenely onto her fingertips but she holds him tight, unmoving.

They’re still and quiet for a while, breathing together, until Tessa starts laughing, “Oh God, our heartbeats are synced,” and they are, he can feel his own pulse in his cock and hers in her thumb pressed hard against him, together.

“With a little help from the team at B2ten,” he quips, and she finally pulls her hand away.

“Shut up.”

After dinner, over the _Globe_ , Tessa says, “I don’t think that counted as a relaxation of the rules.”

“Oh?” says Scott.

“Yeah,” she says. “We didn’t fuck, we didn’t kiss, nothing happened.” Tessa is her own fiercest competition and she'd never brook any discussion about the arbitrariness of the rules in the first place, or the fact that nobody other than them would know.

“Sure,” he says.

❧

One very early Monday morning, Scott suggests that he bring over lunch and settle in for a rewatch of _My Fair Lady_ their next afternoon off, the following Sunday. Tessa looks forward to it all week. He pulls her into his lap during the ball scene.

“Really?” she says.

“Yeah,” he says, and slides his fingertips under the waistband of her leggings.

“Even though you brought sashimi and picked a movie I like, I’m not going to fuck you,” she says primly. 

He’s reaching around her to tug her leggings off completely now, and she shimmies her hips to facilitate.

“Oh good,” he replies, “Me either.”

“So what’s on the agenda?” she asks.

“I thought we’d just finish the movie,” he says into her hair.

They do, but it’s a good thing she’s seen it dozens of times before, because she can’t focus. Scott spends the next hour lazily tracing circles around her nipples through her tank top, pulling away when she shivers, slipping his fingers just beneath the bands of her underwear, pulling away when she presses her hips toward him, nipping her earlobe, nipping her neck, leaning over her to trace her collarbone with the tip of his tongue, stroking her hair, stroking her thighs. By the time Higgins asks Eliza for his slippers, Tessa is a raw nerve. Scott’s fingers are resting lightly over her cunt with just a thin layer of fabric between, and she knows he must feel her throbbing.

“You picked _My Fair Lady_ because it’s long!” she manages to say, mustering an accusatory tone.

“I did,” he admits, and curls his fingers against her, making her shiver again.

“I’m still—not going to fuck you before we’re done in Korea—but you should tell me how many days that is,” she says.

“Eighty-five days,” he says, without needing to think about it.

“Until what,” she says.

“I hadn’t thought that far ahead,” says Scott, “But maybe something to do with this,” and he slides his hand under the soaked-through fabric of her underwear and spreads her lips apart. She’s so wet she can’t stand it and it takes everything in her power not to grind against him when he brushes the tip of his middle finger across her entrance, not pressing into her, and then traces up and around her clit, not across it.

“Scott,” she whispers.

“I’m not going to fuck you,” he whispers back, and he’s really not, he’s just spreading her open and holding her there, so fucking lewd and so fucking tender. She thinks she might pass out when he brushes his left hand across her mouth and slides two fingers into it, but she bites him instead.

“If you make me wait more than eighty-five days, I’ll kill you with my bare hands,” she murmurs.

❧

At the beginning of the fall, Tessa had launched a new evening project of plowing through the complete oeuvre of Margaret Atwood in chronological order, all first editions in hardcover. Some of them are a little musty, but, as she explained to Scott when they started showing up in the mail, always armed with a reason for everything even if he never inquires, she doesn’t want her first experience of any of the deep cuts to be informed by revisions or later prefatory material. Besides, the book club discussion questions in all the new paperback editions are condescending.

“And nothing makes me want sex with men less than Margaret Atwood. It’s for the health of our partnership,” she concludes. Sure.

She’s finally arrived in the 80s, and is about two-thirds of the way through _Bodily Harm_ in bed next to Scott, who’s reading box scores on his phone, her calves draped companionably over his shins, when he hears the book snap shut and a thump as it lands on the nightstand. In his peripheral vision he sees the top of Tessa’s head vanish under the duvet, and suddenly she’s untying the drawstring of his sweatpants and tugging them down to his hips.

“Tess,” Scott whines, “We said we weren’t gonna do this. Hands off.”

“No hands, and I’m not doing anything,” she breathes so soft he can barely hear her, and then wraps her mouth around him.

He’s not hard yet but her mouth is so hot and wet, and her lips are so soft against the base of his dick, and he starts to throb.

“Tess,” he groans. He feels more than hears her murmur something around him in response, and the flicker of her tongue it entails, and his hands involuntarily move to her hair.

She withdraws immediately and pushes the duvet aside to look at him.

“No hands,” she says.

“Fuck,” he whimpers.

“No,” she repeats, and takes him back into her mouth.

She stays still around him for he can’t tell how long. His hands are balled into fists by his sides and one of hers is resting against his thigh, the other palm-up on his abdomen, pillowing her cheek. It’s torturous every time she shifts slightly. He can feel her saliva pooling on his groin and dimly he registers that he’d never been so completely inside her mouth before, swallowed whole. Not doing anything. He’s breathing hard and his hands twist in the sheets, and he just needs, he needs—

Tessa lets go of him then, pulls off of him slowly, brushes her lips lightly over the tip of his cock, not a kiss, not quite. She reappears from under the duvet, licking her lips.

“Jesus, Tess,” he gasps. “What was that for.”

“Electrolytes,” she says blandly, and picks up her novel again.

❧

Scott’s discreet, they both still sometimes err on the side of politeness around each other despite everything, but Tessa is aware that he must jerk off when she’s not around. She’s a little more cavalier about it, disappearing for suspiciously long showers after an evening at his place if she’s planning to sleep over, because orgasm is her surest route to a full night’s sleep and it’s not something she’ll let him help with.

She’s keeping a countdown in her head too, now, doesn’t need to ask Scott anymore. Thirty-six days, thirty-five, thirty-four, thirty-three.

One night while they’re undressing for bed he surprises her by saying, “You don’t have to disappear to take care of yourself, you know. You can just pretend I’m not here.”

Something about the implied permissiveness of his tone makes this the most vulgar thing he’s said to her since they started this whole tentative dance, and Tessa almost chokes on her camomile tea.

“I won’t interrupt you or kiss you or touch you or anything,” he adds hastily, “I won’t get in your way, I just don’t think you should feel like you need to sneak off.” He’s trying so hard to be tactful, she thinks she might die of embarrassment.

“Would you like to try telling me that again, except make it sound like something you actually want?”

“Ugh,” says Scott, and he’s blushing, she can see even in the bedroom’s semidark. “I miss seeing you come. It’s driving me crazy. I want to watch you.” Better.

“Well, if you insist,” she says.

“I mean, it’s up to you, but,” he trails off. He’s still blushing like a kid, he looks like he wants to disappear through the floor for having brought it up at all, and she thinks it’s frankly more fucking delicious than when he’s confident and self-assured. Tessa loves him with a particular keenness when she makes him tell her what he wants, because it’s always Scott at his most vulnerable.

She leads him to the bed and gently pushes him down, lays next to him, lets him wrap one arm around her, and hooks a leg over his hips so her thighs are spread wide apart. From her vantage on his shoulder, their lips are almost touching when she turns her head toward him. She spreads herself open with her left hand and smears her wetness across her clit with the right while he watches her, eyes wide, mouth stupidly agape.

“Is this what you had in mind?” she asks softly.

“Pretty much, yeah,” he almost whimpers, “But maybe I could—” and lays his hand gingerly on top of hers between her legs, “I’m not going to touch you, I just want to feel it.”

His hand tightens around her wrist when she comes, gasping into his mouth, not kissing. His grip on her shoulder is so firm she can tell it’ll bruise. When she opens her eyes again he’s breathing hard too, pupils dilated, face flushed. 

“I did get to taste you, so it’s only fair,” she says, and slips her slick fingers into his mouth. He closes his eyes and she feels him shiver, presses harder against his side.

“I’m not going to fuck you,” she whispers.

“No,” he whispers back.

“Or kiss you,” she tries to add, but he stops her by leaning forward a fraction of an inch and taking her lower lip lightly between his teeth. It doesn’t count, she decides.


	2. articulatory phonetics

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's almost comical, but he’s fucking hard all of a sudden, so who’s the real joke here.

To supplement the weekend crossword, his menu planning, and Tessa's Canadian feminist literary history syllabus, Scott proposes working on their atrocious French as a nightly distraction from the sex they persist in not having.

"That's great," says Tessa. "It's practically an obligation if we want to stay here." They hadn't yet really discussed the nebulous post-retirement future, and Scott grins at the first person plural, although she's wrong about it being an obligation. After a year and a half, he can order a pizza in French but not understand a pop song or read a newspaper, and it works fine. Tessa's just the neurotic type to feel uncomfortable about being a monolingual Anglo in Quebec even if Montreal makes it easy.

The following evening, Tessa puts on an old Coeur de pirate album for ambience while Scott does the dishes, then ambushes him at the kitchen table with a linguistics professor's website about articulatory phonetics open on her tablet.

"It'll help us learn better if we have a strong technical vocabulary, just like skating. I’ve been reading around. Listen to this," she says seriously. "I'm going to articulate a phoneme, and you watch."

"If I'm not mistaken, you just articulated a bunch of phonemes in a row."

"Scott, shut up.” He looks at her expectantly. “That was it, I just wanted you to see an unvoiced bilabial consonant. Shut  _up_ ,” she says again, pressing her lips tightly together then exhaling sharply to emphasize the stop. She waggles her eyebrows at him behind her horn-rimmed glasses. Her pink lipstick from when she was out running errands in the afternoon is half worn off into a ragged ombré. They're between competitions and press events, and the half-inch of lighter roots visible in her hair is Scott's favourite look, because it's Tessa at her most relaxed, giving herself a break.

“Tess, don’t say the word ‘labial’, that’s filthy," he says.

“It’s not filthy, it’s accurate. It’s a site of vocal tract articulation,” she says. "There’s more, like the tongue is one. Say something to me but pay attention to your tongue, and after, I’ll tell you the names for what it was doing.”

He's been working hard lately to  _not_  cultivate heightened proprioception of his tongue.

“Uh, maybe this was a bad idea.”

“‘Bad idea’ is good. There’s two alveolar consonants in there. I’ll show you where the sound is formed.”

"Tessa. If I have to think about the anatomy of the inside of your mouth, I'll die. Right now. You'll need to find a new dance partner and it'll be really inconvenient."

"Right here," she says, ignoring him. She grabs his hand, turns it palm-up, crooks his index finger, slides it behind her teeth, and taps it with the tip of her tongue.

"Jesus Christ," he says.

"Wrong, it's the alveolar ridge," she corrects him, slightly muffled. She curls her tongue around his fingertip as she withdraws it, then says more quietly, turning his hand over, “You’re already familiar with the hard palate and the velum,” and rearranging his fingers, she slides three of them all the way to the back of her mouth. She swallows deliberately, her throat constricting, not breaking eye contact.

It's almost comical, but he’s fucking hard all of a sudden, so who’s the real joke here.

“So that’s how it’s gonna be?” Scott does his best to keep his voice level and tone conversational. Tessa nods wordlessly. “What if I actually wanted to work on our French instead of working on your oral technique?” 

She  _winks_ at him, like it’s an interview with a lifestyle reporter she’s charming into submission, like his hand isn’t shoved crudely deep into her mouth, like what’s left of her lipstick isn’t smeared across the back of it, like she doesn't have saliva starting to drip down her chin, like she isn’t tracing her tongue up and down and between his fingers, still watching him.

“Look, let me have my hand back. This is undignified.” She grabs him by the wrist and pulls his hand away slowly, gasping a little when she has her mouth to herself again, out of breath, eyes watering.

“How long did it take you to make this whole thing into a weird hot-for-teacher fantasy? It was a little unsubtle. The  _glasses_ , for God’s sake.” He’s babbling now, but can’t stop himself, which is not helping the indignity.

“Like twenty minutes on Wikipedia this morning when you got up to make coffee, to hammer out a rough draft,” she grins impishly for the first time since they sat down. “I skipped a lot of details. It wasn’t a good overview. I figured if you were serious about language learning, you would’ve asked a Francophone.”

Scott raises an eyebrow. “I leave you alone in my bed for twenty minutes at five in the morning, and you spend it daydreaming about blowing me?”

She shrugs. “Now you know the name of the alveolar ridge, so it was time well spent.” She’s right, it’s her favourite place to press the tip of his cock against when she wants to tease him, trapping it there between her tongue and her teeth.

It strikes Scott that they had never talked so often or so frankly about sex even when they were having a lot of it. She always preferred to just show him what she wanted, so they never had to talk, so they didn't. The new Tessa of brazen, guileless innuendo is a whole other world. Thousands of therapy hours honing their communication skills had apparently not gone to waste.

“How about, instead of, uh, practicing French, I take a quick shower, we watch  _Suits_  until you fall asleep, and tomorrow we pretend it never happened,” he says.

"How about, I'll join you in the shower."

"Tempting, but no, Tessa, I'm still not going to fuck you," he says, though the words sound almost wistful as they leave his lips.

“I'll keep the couch warm, then," she says lightly, and wipes her mouth with her hand. She's luminously beautiful in the dim kitchen light, and an unbelievable mess of smeared lipstick and mascara.

Scott's not sure he can stand up, but he tries it, and he manages.


	3. book club

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Tessa, did you just exploit your clean sheets to con your way into the shower with me? I'm shocked," he says.
> 
> "You're an easy mark," she says, and pushes him against the tile.

Tessa tells Jordan about the Margaret Atwood project, and her sister immediately orders her a novel by Marian Engel. It’s delivered to her home one afternoon in purple giftwrap. The accompanying note reads only "Margaret Atwood blurbed it," which indeed she had.  _Plausible as kitchens, but shapely as a folktale,_ the endorsement says cryptically in a slim serif font on the cover.

It's really more of a novella. By the end of the evening, Tessa has finished it already, even though she only started it over dinner, which was Scott’s doing—kale and a variety of mushrooms sautéed with shallots in duck fat, piled onto ribeyes that he seared on the charcoal grill he had brought over and tucked illicitly between Tessa's balcony door and the fire escape, with a mustard-heavy pan sauce that didn’t emulsify the first time and needed a mulligan.

"Good, it's getting late. What's the verdict?" Scott says when she sets the book down on the coffee table. 

“It was, uh, good. Deft," says Tessa, clearing her throat. "Scott, would you mind taking a shower before we go to bed? It's the grill smoke, you smell like a bonfire, and it'll stick to your hair. I just changed the sheets," she adds, wrinkling her nose.

"Of course, I'll meet you there," says Scott, rising from the chesterfield. She hangs back a little but trails him down the hall, through the bedroom, and into the ensuite, and watches him from the door as he begins to undress. His eyes meet hers in the mirror.

"Anything I can help you with?" he asks.

"Laundry service," she says, reaching out to take his sweater from him.

"Sure," he says.

"And the rest," she says.

Scott undresses slowly, still facing away from her, folding each garment with needless care as he removes it, finally turning to her, naked, with the whole stack of jeans, shirt, boxers, socks.

"Thanks," she says, taking it and disappearing back into the bedroom. She reappears a few minutes later after the bathroom has filled with steam, naked too, her hair in a knot at the nape of her neck, and slips into the shower in front of him.

"Tessa, did you just exploit your clean sheets to con your way into the shower with me? I'm shocked," he says.

"You're an easy mark," she says, and pushes him against the tile.

❧

Biting is categorically distinct from kissing, Tessa had already determined. Trapping Scott's lip between her teeth and tracing it with her tongue is only a variation on the theme, no matter how complex a contrapuntal arrangement she devises with him when they lie together, not kissing, for hours. She does it softly, not to bruise.

It's too close to sex, she concluded, if she lets him touch her. But if he parts her legs and guides her hands with his, well, it's nothing she couldn't have done herself.

It's not impermissible, she decided, to take his cock in her hand, or her mouth, but just to hold. She always pulls her lower lip taut over her teeth when she lets go of him, dragging slow over his frenulum, to make him gasp. She wears her hair down deliberately, so strands of it will adhere to her lips when she pulls away to catch her breath, and knows it kills him that he's not allowed to reach out and brush it back from her face, or knot his hands into it and press himself deeper into her mouth. Scott does bite her lips to bruise them, which seems fair.

During the break, she became superstitious about the effect that fucking Scott has had on their work in the past. Not that there weren't other contributing factors—trying to date other people at the same time; her injuries; postsurgical pain; Marina; Scott blaming her for her injuries and then expecting her to manage his guilt about it (for which she has since forgiven him, though it was a long narrative arc in their joint counseling regimen). But there's a distinct correlation.

Scott didn't argue when she proposed this boundary as a new element of seriousness they could introduce to their training, treating it with the same solemnity as any other of the ambitions she's brought to him. The specifics of what counted and not, though, were all at her discretion. At first, in the summer, she blushed when he made her tell him the particulars, his hands hovering over her, not touching, but now it's January and she relishes telling him every detail of what she wants him to do to her but won't permit.

It's unbelievable to know that she could have asked him not to fuck her any time in the last ten years, and he would have. She can push right up against the white-hot liminal space between fucking and not, and he'll push her right back without letting her encroach on it. His dance frame has always been his strong suit.

He is incredible not to fuck, and she says so, in the shower, where he's not quite inside her. She's balanced on the balls of her feet in front of him, with her back arched, and her shoulders pressed against his chest, and his erection pressed between her thighs, and his hands pressed against the curves of her hips, and her hands holding them there, and her lips pressed against his ear.

It's a little perilous on the slick porcelain, but she shifts her hips forward and back again, stroking him, without touching, technically. Scott groans, then tightens his grip on her to still her movement. "We're so full of shit," he says.

"We're about to run out of hot water," she says, and then they do.

❧

Over breakfast the next morning, he asks, "Did you know that your novel was written for an anthology? It was going to be called _Across Canada by Pornograph_ and Margaret Atwood was going to edit it, but it fell through."

"A part of our history," says Tessa, just as Scott starts to say it too, and she laughs.

"No, I didn't know. When did you have time to find that out?" she asks. They've been spending more evenings together than not, heading to the rink together before dawn, and most of their days are consumed by more intense work than Tessa had ever done in her life.

"Jordan told me she was sending it, so I googled it while you were at barre. I thought I could try being interested in some of your interests," he says.

"Why are you talking to my sister? And thanks," she says. "You're very supportive."

"She’s hilarious. She says we're revolting and she's sick of us, but she’s your family, so she’s obligated to talk to us. Anyway, you told me the prose was deft, but you didn't tell me it was about a librarian getting eaten out by a bear," Scott says.

"Not to anyone’s satisfaction," she says. "It did win an award, and it’s not really about sex. I was trying to spare you the gory details."

"You don't have to spare me anything, ever," he says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Selected book club discussion questions from the 2014 Emblem paperback edition of Marian Engel's _Bear_ , the 1976 winner of the Governor General's Literary Award:
> 
>   * Did you find that Engel's precise, slender prose and upbeat realism inhibit _Bear_ 's potential mythic underpinnings?
>   * Are the sex scenes meant to be satiric?
>   * How did the sexual tension make you feel?
>   * Was there more to their relationship [i.e. the relationship between the protagonist, Lou, and the bear, which is a bear] than pure eroticism?
>   * What does the novel have to say about sexual empowerment?
> 



	4. meal prep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tessa smells like she'll taste like the drydown of her perfume: like herself, like jasmine, like truffle, like something darker and more mysterious than an orchid. Scott groans involuntarily against her and feels her hand on his cheek.
> 
> "I thought we were leaving this at work for now," she says quietly, her eyes still closed. 
> 
> "I'm not doing anything," he whispers.
> 
> "Okay," she whispers back, and shifts her hips toward him.

Everything in Scott's life that had not previously pertained to sex definitely does now.

In the summer it was pitting cherries for the clafoutis that Tessa doesn't like to assemble but loves to pull out of the oven with a flourish, rolling the cherrystones between his fingertips and imagining her breasts in his hands.

In the autumn it was the acerbic tang of the sourdough starter he was nursing in his fridge (diligently left with a neighbour for safekeeping whenever they were travelling), the supple elasticity of the dough as he stretches and folds it into shape, tacky against the cold marble countertop, warm against his palms.

In the winter it's supreming tangerines and blood oranges to bring back to her in bed on Sunday mornings, his fingers slick with pectin as he separates the flesh from its membrane.

It's massaging mineral oil and beeswax into the neglected butcher block in Tessa's kitchen until it glows, smooth and vital, the burled Nova Scotia larch a few shades darker gold than before. Tessa momentarily forgets herself and kisses his fingers afterward, soft and sweet-smelling. 

It's being caught off guard by the scent of lemongrass in the refrigerator case at the dep where he's picking up beer, so similar to her vetiver fragrance from the summer that his heart leaps into his throat.

She's switched the vetiver out for something mustier and more penetrating for the cold weather, and he commits the new notes to memory, and it's the nearly electric shock when he wraps his scarf around his neck and realizes she must have borrowed it because it smells like her and now so does he, sillage-faint but unmistakable.

It's the short French book on embodied cognition that Patch loans to him in translation after they overheard some friend of Gabi's insinuate that Tessa's athleticism had outstripped her artistry. Scott was so furious about it that their practice was delayed by half an hour while he fought to regulate his breathing.

"The body also thinks," Patch had said by way of explanation, handing him the paperback after they'd finally wrapped up.

"You either die an artist, or live long enough to see yourself become a dumb jock," Tessa had said coolly, with a shrug.

There's a passage in there on the character of honey and the experience of taste. Scott's eyes about pop out of his head when he encounters a sentence about "an indelible softness that lingers in the mouth for an indefinite duration, that survives swallowing."

Tessa shows up that Saturday  in the late afternoon, in Sorels and sweats and clear plastic glasses, hair tied back, with a bottle of  Côtes-du-Rhône and the _Globe_. She rereads her notes on their rhumba weaknesses while Scott finishes dinner —rack of Alberta lamb carved into medallions two ribs thick, still bloody (buttery rich with a whisper of charcoal); rosemary gremolata (grassy and sharp); roasted carrots and beetroot (earthy and full); a mound of caramelized Vidalia onion (so sweet).

She spreads out the crossword after they clear the table and sets methodically to work in black ink, brow furrowed. She's been quiet since she arrived, and Scott's sure that the idiot comment about her strength is stuck in her craw. It's such a fundamental misunderstanding of her that he's angry about it all over again.

"Powerful beyond man's understanding, six letters: J-A-C-K-E-D," he says from across the kitchen, where he’s wiping the counter. 

"Thanks, you're very helpful," she says, but she also smiles at him for the first time all evening. He sets down the dishrag and comes closer, reaching for her traps, which are visibly taut. 

"You know this already, but you’re the strongest person I’ve ever met," he says. 

"I do know, but I like hearing it from you," she says. He sinks to his knees in front of her, their eyes level.

"May I undress you," he asks.

"Okay," she says, and lets him pull her shirt off, and her sweatpants, and her underwear, folding them and setting them on the table.

When she's naked before him, he murmurs, "I'm not going to kiss you," and brushes his lips from her ankle up the slender scar on one shin, to her knee, along the line of one adductor as she tenses under him, but when he looks up to her face she's closed her eyes.

Tessa smells like she'll taste like the drydown of her perfume: like herself, like jasmine, like truffle, like something darker and more mysterious than an orchid. Scott groans involuntarily against her and feels her hand on his cheek.

"I thought we were leaving this at work for now," she says quietly, her eyes still closed. 

"I'm not doing anything," he whispers.

"Okay," she whispers back, and shifts her hips toward him.

It makes him dizzy to recall that he's never fucked Tessa in this apartment, but he doesn't slip his index finger inside her to trace light circles around her cervix in the way he knows would overwhelm her to orgasm against his mouth, or scoop her off the chair and lay her on the floor, or cradle the back of her head in his hands, or slide into her while she wraps her legs around his hips to draw him in deeper, or come inside her, or fuck her with three of his fingers afterward while she's still breathless and soft and full of him, until she comes around him again.

Instead, he traces the perimeter of her vulva with his tongue, drags the flat of it up to her clit, takes it lightly between his teeth, holds her there. His hair is long enough for her to tangle her fingers in, but she doesn’t, one hand resting lightly on the back of his head, the other on her own chest, over her heart. He flicks his tongue against her and feels her begin to tremble, backs off and breathes her in until she recovers, comes back to her.

Finally she does knot her fingers in his hair, but only to pull his mouth away.

Over an hour later, well after they've both cleaned up, Scott can still taste her on the tip of his tongue, sweat and cunt and ylang-ylang.


	5. nightcap

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I respect your process, but I'm not going to take the edge off for you, Tess," he says, wrapping his arms around her and drawing her close. "What's a few more days?"
> 
> " _You_ don't need to do anything," she says, shrugging out of his grip and untying his sweatpants.
> 
> "Is that so," he says, voice suddenly hoarse.
> 
> She answers by roughly tugging his sweats down to his hips, shoving her own underwear to one side, and pressing her cunt against the tip of his cock.

Tessa always sleeps fitfully or not at all the night before a travel day.

She does what she can to mitigate her nerves, which is primarily to make lists: she packs her wardrobe and costumes a week in advance, writes a detailed gear inventory as though she couldn't assemble her kit on autopilot, stops at the MAC counter in the Bay on Rue St-Catherine to buy duplicates of all the makeup she needs to bring with her so she can stop obsessing about the prospect of forgetting something critical.

They'll be spending the night at her place instead of Scott's. He volunteers to bring over a few dinner things to combine with what remains in her fridge, leaving enough leftovers for breakfast and no more, so she can be assured that all the perishables are accounted for and nothing has gone to waste.

He arrives shortly before six with what she recognizes as one chamber of a beef heart wrapped in butcher paper ("You old romantic," she says), two russet potatoes, a bag of Brussels sprouts, a head of garlic, three shallots, a gnarled celery root, a bundle of arugula, and a fistful of carrots.

She's dubious at first, but feels herself slowly unwind as she watches him trim the arteries and sinew from the glossy red muscle and drop the scraps into her cast iron skillet to render out their tallow, slice each sprout in half from pole to pole, crush the garlic cloves lightly against her butcher block under the heel of his hand so they slip out of their skins, turn the carrots with the tiny curved paring knife he left in her cutlery drawer and save the leafy tops in a glass of water, peel and dice the celeriac, drop the vegetables all at once into the tallow to brown deeply before transferring the skillet to the oven, siphon off some of the fat from the duck confit he had left at her place some previous evening and whisk it with balsamic vinegar from her cabinet, season it only with pepper and fleur de sel from her countertop, tear the greens from their stalks and toss them in the vinaigrette, slice the heart into thick slabs and salt them too, return the skillet to the stove, plate the vegetables, sear the heart in the smoking remains of the tallow, arrange the greens into rough nests overlapping the carrots and sprouts, arrange the heart atop them.

"How's it going over there?" he asks.

"Hm?" she replies.

"You've been staring for about twenty minutes," he says.

"Oh," she says. Her lips are dry; they must have been parted. "I guess you're fun to watch."

It's not untrue: she's struck by the economy of his movement, his thoughtfulness about the order of operations when faced with a set of tasks, his nimble fingers. She loves him especially in motion, the intensity of focus and practice that his ease betrays. The appearance of effortlessness in their work has always involved the concealment of their labour, and it thrills her to know that he's worked to be effortless for her, too, in private.

"How about," says Scott, "You take a break from admiring me and grab a beer. I saw you have a Fin du Monde, we'll split it."

It's the last one at the back of the fridge, and they pass it back and forth over dinner, which is a bit cobbled together, he demurs, but it works for her, salty-sour-smoky-sweet, with the lean metallic bite of heart, lukewarm and rare beneath the sear.

Afterward she floats around aimlessly, having already cleaned the apartment for an extended absence, leaving herself nothing substantive to do. She tries a novel ( _The Year of the Flood_ : too chaotic to follow tonight), a bath (too difficult to stay still for any longer than the ten minutes she manages to last), a cup of tea (pleasant but over too quickly), a sequence of breathing exercises (too uncomfortable being alone with her thoughts in the quiet), and finally joins Scott in her bed, where he’s reclining in sweats, streaming radio coverage of a Leafs game (insufficiently engrossing, so she takes his phone out of his hand, pulls her shirt off, and climbs on top of him).

"I respect your process, but I'm not going to take the edge off for you, Tess," he says, wrapping his arms around her and drawing her close. "What's a few more days?"

" _You_  don't need to do anything," she says, shrugging out of his grip and untying his sweatpants.

"Is that so," he says, voice suddenly hoarse.

She answers by roughly tugging his sweats down to his hips, shoving her own underwear to one side, and pressing her cunt against the tip of his cock.

"Just this," she whispers, and he nods, his expression glazed. He’s throbbing against her and his hands on her hips, holding her steady, are trembling.

She kisses him lightly, experimentally, and then, when he almost sobs with relief into her mouth, with teeth and bruising force. For a long moment he buries his hands in her hair and kisses her back.

“No cheating,” he says finally, pushing her off. “Tessa Virtue, you lawless fiend.”

It’s another couple of hours before she finally drifts off, but she does, curled up behind him, with her cheek pressed between his shoulder blades and her hand on his thigh.

Breakfast the next morning is an abbreviated affair. Tessa decants the last four eggs from her fridge into simmering saltwater; Scott dices the two russets and quarters the shallots and fries them together in more fat from the confit, shreds the duck, slices the last of the heart thinly across the grain, warms the meats briefly in the skillet, stirs in the carrot greens to wilt in the residual heat, and slides the eggs over everything. They eat standing over the stove, too antsy to sit down. The dishes are minimal.

While Scott takes the compost out to her building's brown bin, Tessa calls for an airport cab and makes one last circuit through the apartment, already in her parka, to check that all the lights are off, the thermostat's turned down but not so low the pipes might freeze, and their bags are all accounted for in the foyer, then stands next to him, looking out the window, lacing her fingers into his. He squeezes her hand.

“Taxi's here,” she says, a few minutes later, and Scott opens the door, and together they step out into the cold.


End file.
